"This is one of the things that made us one of the world''s leading bootleggers; the Canadian government never for a second questioned the right of brewers and distillers to export. " Craig Heron in conversation with Amanda Crocker, December 2003 AMANDA CROCKER : Why did you decide to write a history of booze? CRAIG HERON : I never intended to write this book, but once the field opened up to me, I realised this book had to be written. I was working on an exhibition on the subject for a small heritage organisation and I was also trying to move ahead in my own work on the leisure time activities of working people. One of the things I wanted to know more about was drinking patterns and the impact of prohibition on drinking patterns, and it was extremely hard to find anything. There is a huge gaping hole on library shelves in this section in Canadian social history. I thought it would be useful to map the terrain, partly to encourage people to do more work on the subject by laying out the whole landscape and seeing what it looked like. However, the more I got into the subject, the more I realised that this was a book that should have been written years ago. So many issues and themes touched just about every imaginable part of Canadian history: the economy, culture, popular culture, social structures, social conflict, politics and the formation of the state, and on and on.

All of these things had a river of booze flowing through them. AC : The title of your book is Booze, but you cover much more than the history of beer, wine, and liquor in Canada. What makes the history of booze important to our broader understanding of Canadian history? CH : Well, starting with the very word itself, booze, I chose it because it encapsulated the two diametrically opposed views about the consumption of alcohol. On one hand, booze was celebrated and you were likely to use the word in a slightly naughty way to suggest that this was a pleasure that should be enjoyed but had a certain disreputable element to it. On the other hand, booze was just spat out of pursed lips by people who despised it and saw everything that was wrong with it. So, it was symbolic of quite different notions of the way people should spend their time and their money and organise their lives as industrial capitalism took hold, as cities grew up. The people who wanted to shut down drinking or restrict it in any way were usually concerned in much larger ways with reconstructing the whole culture to make it one based much more on self control and self discipline and, in the fullest sense, a more sobered and temperate approach to living. And when it became necessary to do that through legislation, they were ready to push for it.

The temperance movement was very much identified with the consolidation of a new dominant class and a new urban middle class in the mid-nineteenth century that saw the need for these kinds of cultural changes as part of a whole transformation in the way that society worked. And of course, booze had enormous implications for gender. It had a lot to do with ways that men understood their masculine identities and expressed these identities through gathering together to consume alcohol in particular spaces that were theirs and theirs alone. Women were far less likely to drink than men and when they did drink, they drank much less. For men it was about self-expression, about establishing their identity as men. Masculinities that were associated with drinking varied considerably: from the more genteel man sipping his claret with his buddies in their exclusive club to the men who left work after six o''clock on a Saturday night to head home after six days of work, stopping off to have a few pints with the boys that they worked with. But, in either form, it was seen as a masculine privilege that men had a right to as providers, as breadwinners. In the nineteenth century, a set of industries were put in place to supply this thirst; these became quite major economic interests in society, which produced one of the earliest and most popular mass consumer goods.

Those companies were at the cutting edge of new advertising policies; at the turn of the twentieth century, they were already using lifestyle advertising, trying to encourage people to drink for reasons linked to lifestyle. Out of that mass commerce in alcohol, governments discovered a wonderful source of revenue that staved off income tax for generatio.